Ask HN: Will GPT-3 bring a worthy competitor to Google search? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Will GPT-3 bring a worthy competitor to Google search?

7 pointsthallukrish8 comments

While I understand what GPT-3 achieved is not a full-fledged service like Google search with all its distributed computing infrastructure, but since GPT-3 has achieved the algorithmic part of the story, does it mean the infra part of the story is where the innovation lies to bring a competing search engine to Google search ?

View on HN

No, but it can enhance Google for certain queries.

Just some things that GPT3 can't do:

- A large portion (of at least mine) queries are 'grep the internet' type of queries. GPT3's powers lie in directly opposite part of the spectrum.

- GPT3's output can not be trusted. It is basically a statistical output of the most likely words to be responding the prompt. In many cases it will be complete gibberish and you have no way of knowing (programmatically) that it is so that you could potentially replace it with something else.

- GPT3 is notoriously bad with numbers and dates.

Finally Google has managed to redefine what search means to the point that 'to search something' means 'to google something' and even if you had superior (by what measure?) results, if they don't match what we are used to getting from Google, you might have a barrier to adoption.

So my bet is that NLP models will augment the abilities of search engines, not replace them. We see that happening already.

We can only hope. In the end, Google will fall when new technology is accessible and powerful enough to create search in a new way. Competing with them as they are is impossible, but competing on search from a new paradigm is possible. If not GPT-3, then something is coming. But I doubt it will look like Google search, it will be different, but will fulfill the same need

GPT can be used to build auto suggestion to search engine. scalable and intelligent crawling, indexing, serving, re-ranking parts are still needs to be developed. IMO, success of search engine business is not merely a technical advancements.

GPT3 isn’t generally able to cite sources and tends to confabulate realistic but incorrect answers to questions. It’s great as an ideation tool, much less so as a search engine.

Google has all the data about what people clicked and if they thought that link was useful. That is a lot of data that other people don't have.

> since GPT-3 has achieved the algorithmic part of the story

Has it? From what I've seen it's just an autocomplete that looks natural.

Google is fucked. GPT-3 understands queries on a whole other level. GPT-3 brings books, links, articles to life as a conversation.

In what way does it do those things?

Reply on news.ycombinator.com